Occupy and Greenham
2021
When I open my queer mind & spirit to the spectacle of Occupy, on the cusp of 2012, what strikes me most is comparison to an occupation that came before. All movements rise out of the deep dirt of past actions, and I write to pay homage to a revolutionary experience of the 1980’s that changed my life and my trajectory, forever. This was Greenham Common Womyn’s Peace Camp, which was an occupation that existed non-stop from 1980-1999. I lived there for 3 years.
Since that time of living in occupation, I’ve continued my life as an activist and a performance artist; I’ve studied social protest and taught revolution. There’s a whole language to describe defiance to power. In the academic discourse of formal territories, claiming space is profoundly important. In discursive language, the naming of physical boundaries defines spheres of power and grants authority to the rules of engagement. “Transgress” just means breaking the rules. Transgressing these defined spheres of power, disobedient people can challenge a system, displacing order and power. It also can get you a seat at the table. The symbolism of declaring an occupation, commandeering and queering public space, declaring common ground and moving into it is where identity politics gay-marries geographical realism.
Both Occupy Wall Street and Greenham Common Womyn’s Peace Camp are place-based protests, and both arose spontaneously out of defiance to authority. In both, regular citizens are challenging a place by acting out of place, and through their subversion, they are becoming empowered. How queer is Occupy Wall Street? Probably more than the requisite 10%.
Both movements were built on the notion of reclaiming the commons, and creating an alternative society, a more “primitive” society that publically rejects industrial civilization, much as Rainbow Gatherings, Burning Man, and The Michigan Women’s Music Festival have done. These others are quasi-political spaces; they all manage to temporarily challenge the power of the status quo without being a threat. And each of these gatherings has created a queer space to accommodate a counter culture within a counter culture. The thrill of those tribal gatherings are that “we” can step outside the dominant culture, and create an alternative lifestyle, a utopian presence. But, these all fall far short of social change movements, and each has particular glaring deficiencies as utopian communities. They are legally sanctioned. They cost money to attend. And, they have their own status quo — mostly middle class, white, privileged, mainstream people having a cool vacation.
Occupy and Greenham Common Peace Camp are in a different category. People have staked their bodies out indefinitely, and illegally. People show themselves as joyfully deviant to the status quo. How queer is the Occupy movement? I’m not sure. What would Occupy be if it was filled with gender bending radical homos? Maybe more like Greenham was.
In 1984, when I arrived from Amerikkka, we had no internet, no cell phones, but no pepper spray either. There were 9 separate camps of womyn occupying each of the gateways into the base. The military called them “Alpha Gate, Beta Gate”, and so on, but we re-named them “Red Gate, Orange Gate Green Gate”, all the way around the base, staking out our rainbow. Yellow Gate was the main gate, where the road signs all pointed. And the signs, for 3 miles, in any direction, had been spray painted with womyn’s symbols, peace signs, anarchy symbols, and other declarations of war against the military base. Property damage was in full swing, and there were no discussions as to whether this constituted “violence” in 1984.
I was a political activist, a lesbian feminist who’d worked with men for years on nuclear issues, and was exhausted with continually defending my space and calling right–on-males out on their privilege or disrespect. Separatism from men was the most radical thing I’d ever heard of, in 1984. Gender was fiercely demarcated for me; I was a dyke- I stood with the womyn, and feminism stood in sharp, unappeasable contrast to masculinism. I wouldn’t hear of crossing those lines, of the political movement of trans-consciousness, for 2 more decades.
In 1984, when I arrived there, Greenham Common was already separated, the peace camp from the base, cut apart by a mythic fence, a real fence that separated the forested commons from the military camp. Outside the fence was womyn’s reclaimed land, filled with ancient oaks and beeches, bluebells, violets and bracken. The base lay within the lines of the 9 mile oval fence, a great domesticated thing, sawed down and paved flat and surrounded by a fringe of old nature and wild feminists. We lived our lives up against watchtowers, runways, huge generators and vehicle compounds. There were many buildings in there — barracks and classrooms — the base commander and his family, and soldiers of an American Air Force and a British one all lived in there. Children went to school in there, and wives did…whatever wives do in there. That reality was enclosed within the jarring geometry of 8 rows of fences, all topped by concertina wire. There was lots of concentration camp imagery, accompanied by jarring and ceaseless sensory assault. Jet planes — F16’s, F-11’s, and Galaxy transporters — were a constant screaming overhead, soldiers shouted at us all night, and powerful arc lights perpetually pierced the nighttime darkness. Passing cars chucked bottles at our undefended circle. We slept on a slice of mud between a busy highway and a nuclear weapons base.
And we were being evicted daily, by 1984. Men called “bailiffs”, who were the garbage collectors of the village, came every morning to try and grab our stuff. Police accompanied them to make sure we were dutifully evicted. Every day, in the morning, we were herded off our reclaimed slice of mud. Strangely, we could just cross the motorway with the full weight of our camp, put it all down on that other side of the road, and be left in peace. Then we’d move it all back. In winter this happened 5 times a day. We didn’t fight them, but we transgressed; we learned to be prepared, and figured out how to move as slowly as possible as they surrounded and harassed us. It was easy to ignore them — we were women and we’d spent our lives surviving male domination. We stored all our kitchen and sleeping gear in prams, big baby carriages that we’d roll across the 6 lanes of traffic. We had terribly abused vehicles that carried a ton of bedding and backpacks, instruments and tools and books. We slept each night under long scrolls of plastic sheets, tossed over the base fence and staked down with stones. Some womyn slept in the forest, building plastic sheeted “benders” around trees. Some slept in the vehicles. There were no phones, no electricity, no running water, and, most importantly, there was no shelter.
It rained all the fucking time. It was cold all year long, and in winter it was dark. Dark. Cold. Raining. We lived under plastic and we circled around a fire. Our campfire had the power of a magical ancient symbol: endurance, hearth and transformation blended roaring in the rain. One lovely memory is of womyn, turning, rotisserie before that fire, clouds of steam rising off their wet forms as the rain fell. Each day the bailiffs would drench that fire, first thing, and try to grab all our wood. They took tea kettles, passports, guitars, backpacks, sleeping bags, everything they could grab. We knew that soon, it would all replaced by donations, and it was. We lived off donations. The camp had captured the attention of progressive individuals and peace groups the world over. Thousands of people supported us, and visitors filled the fire circles for years with the temporary warmth of their presence. So many womyn came! In winter, we had hot meals brought to us every night. We had “night watches” show up from all over the U.K. so we could sleep, protected in that open space between the woods womb and the bomb tomb.
By 1984, 3 years into the encampment, Greenham had become a center of the international feminist movement. There were still a lot of straight, white, middle class peace campaigners around, mums and grannies, religious women and journalists, but now there were dykes, tons of Lesbians from all over the world who’d come to join this amazing experiment.
Since the 1970’s, womyn’s lands were springing up in parts of the U.S. and in Europe. These were communes in the country that women bought cheap and moved on to. Womyn’s lands focused on womyn as primary, they were about revolting from the patriarchy , creating magical liberation, and through collective and sustainable living, women produced and pollinated a womyn’s culture. Under it all, we believed we could live separate from the Patriarchy, that we could heal from male violence, that we could cut the hierarchy and domination right out of our lives. We were wrong, on some levels, but on others, this was a revolution that had been coming for 5,000 years. It was complete heresy. It was re-membered and reclaimed magic blended with radical social protest growing in a petri-terrarium, a culture of feral wildness, and it was unbelievably powerful.
The gender bending at the mores politically-radical peace camp was an expression of feminism. Greenham womyn confronted the heart of gender oppression by turning the concept of “women’s place” on it’s spiky head. While we were not all dykes, the peace camp evolved over a few years from peace campaigners peacefully and symbolically protesting nukes, to an army of defiant radical feminists and wild lesbians who came to rage against the institution of patriarchy, so aptly symbolized by the military. Womyn formed coalitions and caucuses. In the 3 years that I was there, there was an anarchist camp and a separatist camp. There were also many homeless womyn, and mentally ill womyn. There was drugs and alcohol. As far as I know, there was no sexual assault, except what threatened us in the dark every night from beyond the flare of our fires. Except what we carried deep inside us.
The metaphors of confrontation and duality were everywhere. You either saw it or you didn’t, but you got it deep inside, on an unconscious level of awareness. There was the base, all concrete and steel and noise and lights. There were the underground silos that housed 96 first-strike nuclear warheads. There were the men, all soldiers and bailiffs and cops. There was the weaponry fortressed in there, the logical brutal consequences of our species’ separation from nature, the atom split, the matter of creation turned into pure destruction. That was our landscape when we faced through the fences. We were on the outside — outlaws, outcast — we were a physical female fringe around all that hardware. That fence taught me more about the conditions of the binary than any university full of discourse on gender politics, in 1984.
Contrasted to the gentle goddess circles, the gardens and folk songs, yurts and tipis and hand built houses of rural womyn’s lands, this was a theater stage of gender war. There were many rituals. There were actions every night. From our slice of mud, we reached in our fabulous deviance across time and space. Living outside that fence, casting our lot with the forest, womyn cooked, danced, wrote songs and told stories, built fires and knitted, built beautiful ornate nests in benders. Outside that fence we spent our days visiting, playing, loving, raging. We were mending. That was one intention we agreed on, when we agreed. Creation of something better, something that came through us like a baby dragon, but bigger, fiercer. Women had decorated that fence for years, and weavings of spiders and serpents, paintings of earth goddesses and avenging goddesses, photos of grandkids, broken eyeglasses and crutches, messages for soldiers and love notes for each other formed a happy wall, a gorgeous vertical quilt. There were snipped bits of wire covering the earth on the womin side of the fence like autumn leaves.
Our actions were fun, unique and brilliant. Our actions made us feel huge and triumphant and ecstatic. In one of the most famous, womyn broke into the base and ritually danced on top of a missile silo for hours. Another time they dressed up as teddy bears and bunnies and climbed over the fence to hold a picnic on the base. In another, we greased our bodies with cooking oil, and ran naked through the base, and no men in uniform could grab and hold us. We spray painted runways, repeatedly attacked military vehicles in their nighttime compounds, blockaded tanks, missile launchers, and built 20 foot high fires in the middle of the road. Womyn entered the base and stole official documents, entered the base and used the phone to call the press, entered the base and hid there for days. We snipped a thousand holes in that fence with our communal bolt cutters. And we used pieces of the fence as our fire grates, suspending our tea and toast over the flames we stoked below.
The presence of so many lesbians at the camp was disturbing to outsiders, and it added to the great heap of our transgressions of proper female behavior. Of course, we were called “man-haters”, and also, “hysterical”. This was because we lived a physical, mental, and spiritual resistance to the comfortable prevalence of the familial ideology. In local courts, in jails, on the roads and in The House of Commons, womyn were continuously challenging expectations about appropriate behavior and normalcy, both for females and for citizens of a participatory democracy. Why should courtrooms or government rules worry us when the threat of utter destruction hung over us constantly? Why should we obey madness? That was our constant question, and we used creative satire to mock power and the farce of law.
Back to a comparison with Occupy. Both of these encampments have been very successful in cultivating memes and spreading propaganda/information to the masses. Both created a spectacle that challenged the daily spectacle, and brought it to a screeching halt. The public spaces they claimed were both deeply symbolic spaces where behavior had been strictly controlled. Both Wall Street and a Nuclear Armed Air Force Base are formal institutions, stabilized by certainty. They’re also both heavily symbolic of the landscape of patriarchy. Nuclear weapons are seen as the ultimate solutions to conflict. Bankers are seen as the sole arbiters of debt and wealth. Governments are seen as sovereign and democratic to the will of the people. If enough of us can, en masse, withhold our consent, if we refuse to agree to these orderly hierarchical scenarios, then we reveal the naked emperor for all to see. And the more people pointing, the better.
Tugging away from my memories, I returning to the landscape of Amerikkka in 2012, there is Occupy, diverse and pollinating. I doubt that this movement could do lots of what the womyn at Greenham got away with doing. In this nation, in this time of the war on terror, (or twot), protestors of Occupy who directly confronted empire with criminal damage and direct civil disobedient actions would be shot, they’d call out the cannons and tanks against us. The conditions of our struggle have changed, the cops are way more militarized now, Amerikkka is a more fascist nation than Britian was then. We’re currently bombing 5 countries and we’re at war with a noun, and the media is more controlled now.
But the conditions in the world are even more dire than they were in 1984. We’ve had years to imagine and to practice fighting back, we have decades of radical analysis to hold us up. I imagine that queers could really have a blast in Occupy, and like we did at Greenham, find playful, creative devices and loopholes and theater stunts and spontaneous attacks on real targets that will be successful. At least we have each other. And we can occupy ports, oil facilities, foreclosure sites, courtrooms. We can occupy fracking sites, student loan offices, military recruitment offices, health insurance offices. We can occupy our representatives, the Supreme Court, the RNC and the DNC. ….the possibilities are indeed endless. All we need is a fire and the spirit to endure, and we can find our freedom and fly.
* The first Occupy protest to receive widespread attention, Occupy Wall Street in New York City's Zuccotti Park, began on 17 September 2011. By 9 October, Occupy protests had taken place or were ongoing in over 951 cities across 82 countries, and in over 600 communities in the United States. *If you need info on Greenham Common, read my memoir.
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